


monsters

by Nixariel



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 10:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7614901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nixariel/pseuds/Nixariel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A snake is a very simple creature. Karai is - not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	monsters

**Author's Note:**

> monsters in your head,  
> monsters in your heart,  
> which will be the first to tear you apart?  
> — H.L.  
> 

There’s a voice in her head, after the fall. It’s quiet at first—more a sense of something breathing than anything else.

But every day, it gets a little louder.

_cold. hungry._

-/-

Karai’s losing her mind. She can feel it going with every word that escapes her, every name she has to struggle to remember. 

And there’s nothing that makes it stop. 

Her f- The Shredder. The Shredder had taken her to the ocean once. A little girl, Karai had tried to build sand castles.

(Because she’d seen the other children running around, making vague lumpy shapes that their fathers congratulated them on. Because she’d watched them in their families of two-three-four and they were _happy_.)

But she built too close to the water, and the waves came, and took the sand back with them. Her hands—strong for all their child’s size, already callused by sword and knife and staff—helpless against that gentle theft.

Had she really started so close? Maybe it was just the tide coming in. Maybe it was just inevitable.

_cold. hungry. ssshelter._

-/-

_“What is this?”  
_ _“We has Karai, Shredder. Just like you ask.”_

-/-

This new den is only a little cool, and there are warm squirming fur-things in plentiful supply. Yet something about it makes her scales itch.

She wants.  
She wants _out_.

-/-

The strange one is back. Again.

Warm like a fur-thing, but patchy with silver scales, he is confusing—and _wrong_.   
And he stares like a predator.

_Shredder_ , something hisses in her. 

The voice, at least, is a familiar oddness. It says many strange words like that: _Shredder_  and _mother_ and  _lies_. But it has also been very quiet of late and she is... wary. 

No, she is  _troubled_. Another word that she’s learned from the voice.

_My name is Karai. My name is Karai._

But what is a ‘name’?

-/-

One day, the food fur-things smell wrong. She doesn’t eat them. Then the air takes on the same scent. 

It makes her dizzy.

When she wakes up, the voice— _Karai_ —is loud again. It is _angry_ —and she is _angry_  too, she finds.

Where is her lovely smooth body, all purple and white?”  
Why can she see from only one angle?  
And where the _hell_ are her fangs—she wants to **bite** something.

“Stockman,” Karai is yelling, “get your slimy claws away from me, or I swear I’ll— _ **you**._ ”

It is the strange one. 

“Daughter—”

Ah. _There_  are her fangs. But he is too far away, so she works the glands in her throat instead.

Her aim is _excellent_. 

Yet he is fast too—fast enough to block, and she only gets his arm. The hiss as venom eats into his gauntlet is distant kin to her own. 

Pity. If she’d gotten his eyes, maybe he’d have finally learned not to stare.

“Stockman,” he says.

“Yezz, Mazzter,” and there is that smell again, but she fights it, Karai fights it, their body shifting into familiar pale heavy coils—

—but the dizziness overwhelms her and all is dark again.

-/-

Karai wakes up. She’s strapped to a table.

_...Kinky._

(There’s going to be an extra-hard boot to the face for whoever did that.) 

But it’s not actually the worst thing Karai’s ever woken up to. There’s a fog in her head that she doesn’t like, but the cool line of her _tanto_  is a comforting pressure against the small of her back. 

She will be out of here in five minutes flat.

Then Stockman buzzes into view and it’s like someone dropped her into ice-water.

_No. Oh **no**._

She doesn’t have five minutes. She doesn’t have one. They— _Shredder_ —wouldn’t have woken Karai up, wouldn’t have armed her, if he hadn’t also found a way to control her. It’s just not his style to take chances like that.

She scrabbles for the monster Shredder’s made of her, tries to pull scales and fangs from her skin—and _can’t_.

There is nothing there. 

The whispery voice in her head, that had pushed her to hunt when food was scarce, that enjoyed every squealing rat she choked down and didn’t care who they looked like—gone.

And in that instant, that spike of undisciplined panic— _what have they done to her what have they taken this time no she hadn’t thought she would miss it no please not again no_ —she hears a drowsy hiss from the back of her mind.

Karai breathes out.

_Not_ that she’s happy to hear it, of course. That she can means Karai is still no-longer-human, still a freak. She is only relieved to be a freak she can recognize.   
And yet.  
(And yet.)

So Stockman must have given her something to suppress the mutation. How often could he have tested it? Maybe it wouldn’t last as long as he thought. Maybe, if she just stalled a little—

“Stockman. Hey, _Stockman_!” she yells at his back, making a big production out of fighting the table’s bindings. If he had to come over and check them, there was another thirty seconds to her.

“Good. You’rrre awake,” is all the fly says. 

He doesn’t come. He doesn’t even look at her, not until he turns with something ugly and squirming in his human hand.

A certain dull horror starts to creep through her veins when she sees it. Only a premonition, surely, because there’s no way she _knows_ what it’s for. No way.

“Karai, I’m going to help you. Juzzt like I finally turned you human again.”

Fury is better than fear. 

“Stockman,” she threatens, “if you don’t let me go, I’ll tear your wings off and stuff them down _both_  your mouths.”

He's right beside her—and now her struggles are real, now Karai just wants to _get. away._

And

she 

**can’t**.

There is only a tickling against her ear and then  
_—PAIN—  
_ nothing. 

 

_Nothing._

_-/-_

_SERVE,_ says the worm.  

Karai screams. Karai rages.  
No. No, she will not!

_SERVE,_ says the worm.

Hate for the Shredder burns red-black under her breastbone; she’ll die first, thank you.

But, sliding cold and smooth over her skin, the snake rises to say:  _no._

The snake says, _sssurvive._

_**SERVE**_ , demands the worm, for it will not be denied.

And that is when the snake acts. 

Strong white scales sweep over Karai, sealing her under their layers like a hatchling enshelled. Like a serpent, torpid in its burrow, when autumn comes to a close.  
Hidden. Safe. Sleeping.

Karai is  _furious,_  even as the deep-dreaming takes her, but a snake understands what a fur-thing does not. 

This is only a winter.  
All winters pass.

So the snake answers: _yes_ , and bows its head, and waits for spring.

-/-

So when they open their eyes, it is the snake who looks out, green and slit-pupiled. 

And when the strange one orders them to kill, it is the snake who follows through while Karai sleeps wrapped in white. 

_She_ calls the Shredder ‘father’, _she_ bites the boy, she fights and hisses and _strikes_. Her armour is strong and the things that would tear into Karai’s soft skin can only slide off hers. 

But there are so _many_ strange words now, so little that makes sense, and no one to explain it. Her questions go unanswered—as they must, until it is time for Karai to wake again.

A snake understands _patiencsse_ very well.

A snake who is sometimes a fur-thing, though, doesn’t have to like it. 

-/-

(And when spring comes, Karai wakens with hate still a hot coal in her chest. The blood of her mother demands Shredder’s death.  
Now.  
Tonight.  
But the snake only whispers, _patiencsse_ , as she tiredly slips into the nest Karai has risen from.)

(And Karai thinks: _maybe_.)

-/-

 

[(here’s a secret: it’s always the heart)](http://451seconds.tumblr.com/post/133429559477/monsters-in-your-head-monsters-in-your-heart)

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love 2012!Karai, she’s got a bit of a thing for going off half-cocked. Snakes, on the other hand, are very patient hunters. I’d really like to see how that’s going to play out in terms of character development for the upcoming season. ~~(And because we’ve seen absolutely nothing of how/if Karai’s come to terms with being a mutant or her various traumas, yes I’m a little bitter about her being forgotten in favour of /manpain/ how could you tell.)~~
> 
> Originally posted on my tumblr [here.](http://nixariel.tumblr.com/post/147868638580/frost-xx-bite-x-heres-a-secret-its-always)  
> 


End file.
